


i tried not to dream about you

by ObscureReference



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study, Children, Contrast AU, Daemons, Gen, Laboratories, Pre-Canon, Science Experiments, Shadow Themes, gralea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-22 03:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11371296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObscureReference/pseuds/ObscureReference
Summary: "There were days Prompto wondered if he was even real.He wasn’t a ghost because he couldn’t have been. Because he didn’t want to be. The problem with that line of thinking was that he couldn’t have been a regular person either. Regular people—Real People—knew one another. They saw each other and said hello. They spoke and touched and they weren’t alone, whether or not they wanted to be."(FFXV/Contrast AU)





	i tried not to dream about you

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place pretty early in the FFXV timeline, and Prompto is a pretty young kid throughout this fic, though he doesn't know just how young yet. Probably around age seven or eight? There's a lot he doesn't know about himself. 
> 
> This is an AU I've had on my mind for a while, but this specific piece is probably more of a warm-up piece for getting back into FFXV right now, though I'd love to do more with it some day. It's based off a [video game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-uKuT4Maqg) called [Contrast.](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Contrast) With no spoilers involved, you play as a young girl's imaginary friend who can interact with both 3D and 2D space by jumping in and out of shadows. The core mechanic of the game—puzzle solving through shadows and being invisible to most people—is what I'm trying to describe here and how that would affect someone, especially a young person who doesn't know why the world was like that for them. The shadow jumping part isn't a big part of this fic, however. It's described, but the focus is more the invisibility and learning about the world here. If I did a poor job describing the mechanics in this fic, I'm sorry and you might be helped by watching some of the video game footage to get a better idea of what I mean. This is a real self-indulgent thing, though I wish I had written a scene where everyone is older too. This is mostly setup. 
> 
> NOTE/MINOR SPOILERS: Prompto starts out this fic in Gralea in the Niflheim laboratories, and mentions of experiments are made, including an incident involving what is probably the body of a young teen (though soulless and never conscious and is probably an empty clone like you see in (SPOILERS!!!) Episode Prompto). Some parts of this fic are different from canon, but obviously clones are used to make daemons in-game too. It's very vague and only briefly mentioned, but if you'd feel more comfortable skipping that, jump down to "He couldn’t stand the thought of being a ghost..." It's near the start of the fic, if that helps.

There were days Prompto wondered if he was even real.

He knew what ghosts were because he had once heard a Scientist—the lot of which were stoic and cruel and just as menacing as the daemons they kept locked up behind thick glass—wondering aloud how many ghosts haunted the halls. The others in the lab had scoffed and rolled their eyes at the idea. Prompto, invisible under one of the examination tables, shook. He’d wandered the halls for days after, wondering if he was a dead thing that hadn’t stayed dead. It had taken days and days before he’d decided he wasn’t a ghost, if only because he couldn’t walk through walls like ghosts were supposed to. Mostly he just hadn’t been able to bear the weight of that thought.

He wasn’t a ghost because he couldn’t have been. Because he didn’t want to be.

The problem with that line of thinking was that he couldn’t have been a regular person either.

Regular people—Real People—knew one another. They saw each other and said hello. They spoke and touched and they weren’t alone, whether or not they wanted to be.

Sometimes the Scientists would bark at a lab assistant to _“Go away!”_

Prompto always flinched at raised voices even though they were never directed at him. He didn’t understand why anyone would want to be alone.

Normal people were _tall_ too. Taller than Prompto by far. He thought he’d been smaller once, but he wasn’t sure. He had never seen anyone as small as him anyway. Not really.

Some of the bodies in the lab were as small as him. Some were smaller and a few were bigger, which made Prompto think he could maybe be bigger one day too. For a while he’d hoped that maybe nobody could see him because he was so small and that one day, when he reached Real Person height, he’d be seen. If he were taller, maybe something would click and he’d be acknowledged. He thought maybe everyone started out like him. Invisible. Lost.

But the bodies in the lab weren’t like him. Not at all. One day, when Prompto had been lingering in one of the storage units, wondering, hoping, a Scientist came in and grabbed a few of the bodies. The ones that were bigger than Prompto but still smaller than the Real People. The Scientist took the bodies and Prompto had followed, and he had watched as they threw the bodies on the examination tables in the lab and made daemons.

Prompto had cried and cried that day. The transformation into a daemon was always gross and frightening and it haunted his memory for weeks after. But mostly he cried because the Scientists had seen the bodies, had touched them—because it turned out the bodies were Real and Prompto still wasn’t.

The bodies in the lab weren’t dead. Prompto had seen dead things before. The Scientists worked with a lot of dead things. The bodies in storage stood and breathed on their own, though. They didn’t speak, didn’t eat, didn’t move without someone else’s hands on their skin. But they were alive. Different than the way the Scientists lived, but they were alive. They were Real.

Sometimes Prompto wondered if he was alive.

He couldn’t stand the thought of being a ghost, so he thought he must have been. He was alive. He just wasn’t real.

He only had a name because of a memory that also might not have been real. It might have been a dream.

 

 

_There were hands on his cheeks, his face, his hair. Someone was touching him._

_“Prompto,” somebody said. “Prompto.”_

_Somebody was crying, maybe. Or maybe that was part of the dream. He couldn’t see anything. Just light and strips of color._

_If anything else was said, Prompto couldn’t hear it. Or couldn’t remember it. Or couldn’t dream it. Something._

_The hands left his face. There was a scream. The world turned to shadow._

Prompto had been wandering the halls with the Scientists for as long as he could remember. The time before that was blank, besides the memory of his name. If that was a memory at all.

But Real or not, it was all Prompto had. Even unreal things had names.

At least, Prompto did.

 

 

Prompto walked the halls. He watched the Scientists on good days, horrified by them and their experiments while aching to understand them at the same time. He crawled through air ducts and climbed up the shadows Real People could not until he ran out of places to go.

When Prompto missed a jump between shadows and he fell, he curled up in a corner so he could ache until the ache wasn’t so awful anymore. Then he wandered around the halls some more until his boredom outweighed his fear and he climbed up the shadows once more.

That was another thing about Real People. They couldn’t disappear like he could.

 

 

By the time he was tall enough to nearly reach most of the Scientists’ hips, Prompto knew the labs by heart. He knew the halls, the corridors, the cracks and crevices of the empty bunkers. He knew the Inside as well as he knew anything.

He didn’t know the Outside. The place surrounding the labs. A bright place. Unknown.

Prompto had seen the doors open to the Outside once. The light had scared him so much he’d scurried between the Scientists’ legs and hid in the dark corners of a storage room until his heart stopped pounding. He had avoided the strange looming door to the Outside ever since.

Until one day he hadn’t.

One day, Prompto heard the Scientists talking about a delivery from Outside, and rather than walking the other way, he’d followed. He watched behind some crates as the Scientists complained to one another, hiding without need, distantly wishing he could complain to somebody too. Through if Prompto had somebody to complain to, he wasn’t sure what he would complain about.

He didn’t have anyone like that anyway, and he never would, so he just watched.

One of the Scientists walked over to the button on the wall. She pressed it. A buzzer rang out. The large shutters on the fall wall lifted.

Prompto slipped out.

He made it two inches passed the gate before he froze. The air was cold. Colder than the air of the lab, which already made Prompto shiver and shake most nights. There was a bright ball in the sky that Prompto assumed was the source of the light. He had known everything in the lab for so long, familiar with its shape even if he didn’t understand its use, that it felt weird not to know something that felt so huge now.

It had always been dim in the labs. Always the same amount of light, almost always just dark enough to make Prompto’s eyes strain. Shadows came in abundance there, all nearly indistinguishable from the walls around them.

Here, in the Outside, the air was sharp and bright and the shadows stood out in stark contrast in flat, distinct shapes. Prompto’s head spun.

The Outside was one huge unknown. He wanted to duck back inside. His awful momentary bravery had led him astray.

Then the shutters rattled and shifted, and the big door behind Prompto slammed shut.

 

 

He was alone.

He had always been alone. No one ever spoke to him. No one could see him.

_~~(He was a ghost.)~~ _

Now, though, without the familiar if unfriendly faces of the Scientists surrounding him, he somehow felt more alone than ever.

He could have waited until the door to Inside opened again. It would be a long time, but he could have waited to sneak back inside. Though that would take days, probably. Maybe weeks. A long time.

Prompto squinted into the open air. The ground under his feet wasn’t the tile of the lab. It looked like the thick concrete floors of the hanger bays. That, at least, was familiar. It stretched out in front of him, as far as the bright blue ceiling above. The blue was not as familiar.

He took a shaky first step. Then another. Another.

The world did not cave in. No daemon swooped down to eat him.

He had never seen a daemon outside one of the cages or tubes of the lab, but this was the Outside. Daemons roamed freely here, he’d heard. It was possible for one to crawl out of any corner here. It was aslo possible they could see what Real People could not.

Prompto swallowed in fear at the thought of being eaten.

 

 

Nobody stopped Prompto from walking away from the facility. Not that he had expected them to.

He walked.

Slowly, the concrete on either side of the path gave way to something else. Brown and sometimes green things. Mostly brown. It took a while before Prompto realized they were plants, though smaller than the ones he’d seen in the lab. Nothing about them resembled a mouth. That had thrown him off at first.

There was still concrete underfoot. It became less uniform as he walked, however. More uneven. The shoulder-height concrete slabs that kept the path boxed in became more and more sparse until it was just the bumpy path stretched out before him and plant life on either side.

He kept walking.

In the distance, he saw big structures he nearly mistook for more labs. The closer he got, though, the more unlike labs they looked. From the outside, the labs Prompto was used to looked like a large, looming beast with a thousand sharp edges that stretched up and up and up into the air. The buildings in the distance weren’t nearly that large or scary. They were all different sizes; some were squat and some were long, though none towered like the laboratory.

Most importantly, the buildings weren’t connected to one another. Prompto didn’t understand the use of labs that weren’t uniform, that weren’t attached to each other. How could the Scientists go where they needed? They would have to go Outside. Scientists never went outside. That was why they got all their deliveries through someone else.

If Real People lived in those buildings at all, Prompto thought they couldn’t have housed Scientists. So maybe people like Prompto lived there instead. Unreal People. People like him, and maybe Prompto was supposed to live there too and he had ended up with the Scientists as a mistake. He gasped at the thought.

Long before Prompto made it to the buildings—which were looking bigger and darker the closer he got—he found a gate in the road. The shoulder-high blocks of concrete that kept People on the road had returned. A guard was stationed on the other side of the gate. He didn’t pay any attention to Prompto, though, not even when Prompto pushed himself over the short walls to walk around the gate.

Since anybody could walk around the gate, Prompto wasn’t sure what the gate was for. But then again, he thought, maybe that was the point of the guard.

There were signs posted on the gate as well, but Prompto couldn’t read them, so he didn’t try. They guard paid him no mind. He walked.

Eventually he realized why the first gate had been so useless. A few vehicles had passed them on the road. They looked like the vehicles that were kept in the hangers in the labs. Like the hangers that lead Outside. Like the one Prompto had left through.

Prompto had climbed into those vehicles once or twice, though he hadn’t figured out how to use them. He’d risked sleeping in the backseats as much as he’d been able with the fear of being driven away in his sleep always on his mind.

The vehicles from the lab had always come from Outside, and Prompto watched a few pass him now. He made sure to keep to the edge of the road so they didn’t hit him. He wasn’t sure the drivers would have swerved out of the way even if they could see him. Nobody in the labs seemed that nice.

These vehicles, he saw, had come through an even bigger gate.

This gate cut across the road like the last, but the fence on either side of the gate extended so far out that Prompto was sure he couldn’t walk around it this time. There were a lot more guards on the other side of the gate this time too. They had big guns.

Even though they couldn’t see him, Prompto ducked his head, hunching in on himself.

Another vehicle with big crates in the back stopped at the gate. A guard waved it through. Prompto darted through the gap as it passed, terrified and almost hopeful that someone would see him and yell. They didn’t.

The vehicle passed by. The guards said nothing. The road stretched on.

Prompto walked.

There were no more gates after that. The buildings in the distance grew larger until they weren’t so distant anymore. Prompto saw shapes that looked like Real People bustling in the streets and between the buildings. There were more people in one place than Prompto had ever seen in his whole life.

They didn’t wear lab coats like the Scientists. The coats these people wore were thicker, and they had cloth wrapped around their faces and hair. Hats and scarves and other things, Prompto later learned. For now, it was all cloth to him. Cloth and barely any skin to keep out the cold.

There were so many of them. Prompto wanted to hide.

He didn’t. If they could see him, he might. But he wanted to know first.

If they could see him, if might cry. Part of him wanted to cry already. There were so many more people than he’d ever seen before.

New people. People who could maybe see him.

He didn’t say hello. He didn’t dare. But he drew closer and closer, and when he stepped around a corner and into the crowd, he was both hopeful and jittery.

 

 

Nobody looked at him.

The Outside wasn’t so different after all.

 

 

Prompto did what he always did when he hurt. He found a corner, curled into a ball, and waited.

 

 

When he started to explore again—which was incredibly frightening with all the strange Not Scientists walking around, leaving Prompto desperate to crawl under a bed or into a closet every five seconds even though he knew they couldn’t see him—Prompto discovered a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand and a lot of new words he struggled to wrap his tongue around.

There were lots of Real People his size walking around, usually hand-in-hand with much bigger people. They weren’t at all like the dull bodies from the lab; the Prompto-sized People walked around on their own. They pointed at buildings and asked questions, and they got answers in return. They weren’t vacant. Nobody shoved them on examination tables and stuck them with sparking plugs and long needles.

That had been one of the weirdest things in those first few days of wandering the city. That people who looked like Prompto could have a mind of their own and still be seen.

The Real People here didn’t go their separate ways at night either. Some of them did, leaving the streets in favor of one of their buildings, but when they got home that night it was usually to find several other people already there. These groups ate together and talked and laughed and wrapped their arms around one another. When they went to bed, the big and small people went to separate beds. Sometimes the big ones shared a bed. Sometimes they didn’t.

Some people went home alone, but many did not. Prompto had never seen the Scientists live in groups this way. The people here really weren’t Scientists at all.

He spent his days a lot like he had those in the lab—wandering the paths, getting a feel for the land. Some evenings, when the sun was low and the shadows long, he climbed to the roofs of the buildings and watched the people below.

He was learning how to live all over again. He was learning how others lived too.

And then he found the “School.”

It took him a while to realize that “School” was a learning place. He hadn’t been sure what it was at first. But after following the throng of small People—“children,” he eventually learned—that walked to certain buildings every morning, he got the idea. School was a place children went to be taught and to learn things. It was a nice idea.

One morning he heard one of the children complain that school was “boring,” but Prompto couldn’t see how that was true. School was a place Prompto could learn things, and there was so much he didn’t know. He didn’t even have to trick anybody to learn. That information was already there, freely given, and all Prompto had to do was sit in the crowd.

The first classroom he found was full of children his height and size. Prompto might have been a child too. He wasn’t sure. Could only Real People be children? He didn’t know. Nobody taught that.

Either way, the first classroom he walked into was full of children his “age,” but Prompto didn’t understand anything that came out of the teacher’s mouth. She used too many words he didn’t know, gestured to too many letters and numbers he was only vaguely familiar with. It was discouraging enough that Prompto ducked out at the first opportunity. He thought School might have been a bust after all.

It was by complete accident that he ended up in the room with children much smaller than him—children who came up to his hip at best. They sat not at desks but instead on a colorful carpet and sang.

Prompto like that a lot better. The words were a lot easier to understand here.

He sat in the corner, wrapping his arms around his legs, and listened. This teacher patted her knees in a rhythm as she sang—louder and lovelier than the rare, quiet humming Prompto had heard in the labs—and she gestured to letters that hung above the board in time.

“That was very good!” the teacher said when the song finished. “Now, how about we do that one more time? Let’s see if you can remember what letter makes what sound.” She pointed to the board again. “Let’s try it. This is A. Does everyone remember the song? A, B, C, D—”

With a burst of confidence, Prompto echoed her.

“A,” he said quietly. His voice was croaky from disuse, and he had to cough before he could continue. “…D, E, F, G…”

He looked around. Nobody heard him mess up. Nobody heard him sing it right either.

The pang of sorrow in his heart was swallowed by the burst of pride. He knew these letters. He recognized them from the papers that had been scattered around the labs and now from the signs that hung above the buildings. And now he was learning their sounds.

Suddenly the world seemed both bigger and less strange all at once.

He sang along with the other kids. “L, M, N, O, P!”

When the song was over, the teacher clapped and praised them all, and even though Prompto knew she couldn’t see him, he felt like she was talking to him anyway. It felt like the sun was in his chest.

When the sun hung low in the sky and the children ran for home, Prompto was disappointed. He went to the roof and mouthed the letters on the street signs to himself. That was a “T” on the red sign on the corner. An “O—A—K” on another. Some letters he were harder to remember. He got “S” and “C” mixed up, and “X” and “Y” looked too alike. Sweat ran down his neck as he sat there in the cold. He was desperate not to forget. He couldn’t imagine getting a chance like this again.

And then school started again the next morning. And the next. The teacher moved on from letters to numbers to art. Prompto couldn’t color with everyone else, but watching the art everyone else drew made his fingers ache.

He came back every day. Once, he even slept in the classroom, eager not to miss the start of the lesson. The janitor nearly stepped on him that night, and Prompto made it a point to sleep on the roof instead of the carpet after that.

Still, one way or another, he learned.

In the mornings, he went to school. In the afternoon, he explored the city until he knew it was well as the labs. He watched the people. He learned so much.

 

 

On good days, Prompto sometimes snuck into the older kids’ classes, but so much of it usually went over his head that he came right back to Miss Anna’s soon enough.

One day, he thought. One day he’d work his way up to older classes. But the stories and laughter of Miss Anna’s class appealed to him so much more than the desks and textbooks of the others.

One morning Miss Anna said, “Winter is almost here! Everyone, make sure you have nice, warm gloves and boots before the snow starts. I know it’s cold now, but it’s going to get even colder soon. Autumn is almost over, you know.” She clapped her hands. “Who here has a birthday in the winter?”

That was when Prompto began to learn about the seasons. And birthdays.

He didn’t have a birthday because he wasn’t sure when or if he was born, but seasons were cool. And winter really was cold.

 

 

“This,” Miss Anna said. “is where we are.”

She was pointing to a map, her finger on one squiggle in a sea of squiggles. Prompto blinked.

“This is a map of Eos,” she said. “And we are in Gralea.” Her finger moved. “Tenebrae is here, and this is the Kingdom of Lucis. Insomnia is here. Altissia is here, near the sea.”

Her finger moved all over the map. Tenebrae, Lucis, and Altissia were all names Prompto had heard in passing, but he’d never connected them to actual _places_. Gralea looked so small in comparison to the rest of Eos—in comparison to the world. Gralea seemed so _big_ to Prompto. But the map said otherwise. It was difficult to wrap his mind around.

“Gralea is the capital of Niflheim,” Miss Anna continued, oblivious to Prompto’s fruitless attempts to imagine the world on a bigger scale. “Just like Insomnia is the capital of Lucis. You’d have to use a train to reach Teenbrae and Altissia from here, but you need a boat to cross the ocean to Lucis.”

Trains and boats. Prompto had seen pictures of those things, but he’d never seen them up close. Not like he’d seen cars.

Miss Anna moved on and grabbed a book off the shelf for story time, but Prompto wasn’t paying attention anymore. He was thinking about things he’d never thought about before. Like the world.

Eos was _huge_. So, so, so big, and Prompto had experienced almost none of it.

 

 

Miss Anna had been right. Winter did come.

One day, near the end of school, when the already short days had begun to grow shorter and the biting air grew even colder until even Prompto, who usually fared well in the cold, began to shiver and hover inside longer than normal, Miss Anna announced, “Remember, class, the winter holidays begin tomorrow! That means no school. Don’t forget!”

She said this like it wasn’t the end of the world. Miss Anna even looked _happy_ about the news, smiling and cheery and red hair tied in a loose bun. The class cheered, but it felt as though somebody had struck Prompto through the heart.

He’d done so much learning lately. He’d come a really long way! He could read small words now and recognize numbers and some maps. He knew a lot. A lot more than he’d known before he’d left the labs.

And suddenly school was over.

Class was dismissed, but Prompto stayed long after Miss Anna left. He stayed there until the sun rose the next morning.

No janitor came to dust the shelves before school. No teachers roamed the halls. The bell rang at the same time it always did, but all the classrooms were empty. Nobody came to school that day. Nor the next.

Prompto’s thoughts swirled with the snow outside. He hadn’t even had the chance to go to the bigger classrooms. The ones with the desks. Had he missed his chance? Had he shown up too late? Would school ever come back, and if so, how long? A year? Two years? It felt like an eternity until then.

On the third day, Prompto stared at the map on the wall. He had stared at it for days until he’d had it nearly memorized. Gralea in Niflheim. Insomnia in Lucis. Tenebrae, Altissia, and all the other places too.

The world was big, and Prompto had seen almost none of it.

School was over, maybe forever. But Prompto wanted to learn everything now. He wanted to _see_ everything now. If school wouldn’t teach him, he’d have to teach himself.

 

 

Prompto could touch things. He could open doors and pick up pennies from the street. He’d shuffled through the papers the Scientists left out in the labs, squinting at the scribbles and diagrams he couldn’t understand. He drew pictures on dusty window sills and scraped peeling paint off the walls.

He touched things. He felt them in his hands. They were always solid.

But nobody seemed to notice when it was him.

In the labs, nobody noticed when he pulled a paper off a desk and snuck it under a table, even if they later complained when they found it was missing. Nobody glanced his way when he opened a door or knocked over a beaker. They noticed later that those things had been moved, but they didn’t notice _him_. They didn’t see that Prompto was the one moving them. He could touch things, but it wasn’t the same as when Real People touched them.

So when he stole a jacket off a clothesline, nobody noticed that either.

 

 

Prompto didn’t think he got cold the way Real People did. Not the same way, at least. He walked around in his oversized shirt and thin, loose pants he’d taken from the labs long ago without much of a problem while everyone around him wore thick coats and earmuffs. But with winter close and the snow thicker than normal, even Prompto shivered.

There was a big distance between Gralea and the other towns, probably. It had taken most of a day for Prompto to walk from the labs to the city, after all. He didn’t know if he could make it outside Gralea without a coat.

Before he left, Prompto found a clothesline and waited for the sun to set.

He tugged a jacket off the line and pulled it over his shoulders. He knew the moment he put it on that nobody else could see it anymore. Not when he wore it like this. Prompto had tested a few times before if anyone noticed when he picked up new clothes, and while the Scientists had sometimes noticed when they were short a pair of scrubs, they had never noticed Prompto wearing those scrubs a few feet away. Once he put on the clothes, he figured, they became a part of him. They were invisible too.

Prompto zipped up the jacket. It felt warm and thick. It had been a long time since he’d changed clothes. There hadn’t been much of a point lately.

He found a pair of boots nearby that mostly fit and put them on too. He felt ready to go.

He didn’t leave immediately, though. The sun was low in the sky, and it had taken a while to find somebody willing to dry their clothes outside in such cool temperatures. He wanted to sit for a minute.

So Prompto sat on the thin string of the clothesline.

Real People couldn’t do what he did. He knew that. Prompto couldn’t do it when he looked like a Real Person either. He had to jump into the shadows to be so weightless.

The world was different in the shadows. He knew, distantly, without knowing how, that he looked different too. When Prompto wasn’t in the shadows, he knew he took up some kind of space. He looked like a Real Person, even if he wasn’t.

Here, in the shadows, he felt… different.

In his mind’s eye, he could see himself as if from a distance. It was a lot like a puppet game Miss Anna had once played with a flashlight and the lights off. Prompto didn’t just jump into the shadows; he _became_ a shadow. It wasn’t that he _looked_ like a silhouette of a person; he _was_ the silhouette. And he could climb and grab onto other silhouettes and shadows the way Real People couldn’t.

It was nice, sometimes. It made it easier to get around when the light was right.

Prompto would have traded it all in a heartbeat to talk to someone else for once.

But he couldn’t do that.

So he sat on the clothesline and kicked his feet in the open air, watching the sun dip over the horizon.

 

 

The sunset was Prompto’s favorite time of day. It was when the shadows took on their longest, oddest shapes, and he got to look at how unusual they became for a few minutes each day. The orange glow across the rooftops was pretty nice too.

There hadn’t been any sunsets in the labs. There hadn’t been any sun there at all.

Prompto liked the outside. He didn’t know how he’d ever been so afraid before.

 

 

Gralea was a big city full of lights, and while there were enough shadows for Prompto to climb in the evening when he wanted, at night the city became one giant lamp. Like the sun. It kept the daemons at bay.

It had been a long time since he’d worried about daemons. The monsters in the lab felt like a long distant world.

Now, with the sun down and Gralea at his back, that worry surged back full force.

Maybe he shouldn’t leave. Maybe he should stay and wait and hope.

But he could already see what would happen. He’d grow stagnant in Gralea the same way he’d grown used to the labs. The air would freeze and the snow would thicken until he couldn’t leave anymore. He’d wander the streets, exploring paths he’d long since memorized, and this time there was no mysterious Outside to push him forward. This time, if he didn’t push himself, he might never go.

Prompto didn’t want to spend all his forevers in the same place. He wanted to see the world.

And he wanted someone to see him too.

Eos was big. Big, big, big. The map on miss Anna’s wall said so.

Somewhere out in that vast hugeness, there had to be somebody like him. Somebody who could see him. There had to be.

He’d left the labs without any reason, and despite his fear, it had worked out really well. Now he had a real reason to leave. Prompto had to believe things would work out a second time too.

Daemons were scary. Really, really scary, and sometimes Prompto woke up in a fright with the image of teeth and tails and wings behind his eyes.

Being alone was scary too, though.

Prompto didn’t want to be alone anymore.

However—

Prompto squinted into the darkness. There were shapes he couldn’t determine were snowdrifts or monsters.

He decided to wait until morning.

 

 

Prompto left at first light when Gralea’s lights dimmed and the city began to wake.

There was a whole lot of nothing at first.

He found a few homes with new people and smaller towns that came nowhere near the size of Gralea. The people and buildings were new, but they also weren’t. Restaurants were restaurants and houses were houses. Prompto belonged to none of them. So he kept walking.

The plants had long since been buried under the snow, and while Prompto had seen Real People struggle to walk through the thicker mounds, he didn’t sink nearly so far into the snow. He moved easier that way, but the fact he barely left any footprints in his wake was almost disappointing. There would be no record that he had traveled here except in his mind.

The color white stretched on and on for miles. Gralea had usually kept their roads pretty clear. While there had occasionally been patches of ice in the streets, it had never been too bad.

This was the countryside. Things were different here.

He made it a point to stop near any parking lots or houses he found late in the day. Even tiny buildings like that had lights at night. It kept him from running into daemons.

Then, the third day of walking, Prompto made a mistake.

He didn’t make it to a town in time.

The daemons came.

 

 

The daemons couldn’t see him either.

At least, Prompto didn’t think so. But he wasn’t sure.

He hadn’t meant to stay out so late. It was hard to judge distance, though, and there was only so long he could loiter in the same tiny town. So it really had only been a matter of time before he’d gotten caught in the dark. He judged time by the length of the shadows, but with so much empty space between one group of people and the next, he’d gotten distracted. He’d forgotten to look at the sun, and by the time he remembered to check, it had already begun to slip below the horizon. There hadn’t been anywhere to run.

The first daemon to slink out of the ground was a ball of fire. It came out of nowhere, flames crackling, and Prompto tripped over himself in his haste to retreat. It’s eyes and mouth were all empty space. Empty and gaping and just the right size to take a bite out of someone like him.

Prompto gasped.

The daemon didn’t turn his way, but it did sniff the air, bobbing this way and that as though it was looking for something. Like it _knew_ Prompto was there and just couldn’t find him. Prompto was close enough to feel the heat of its flames, and the feeling made his stomach churn despite the chill of the snow.

He scrambled away. He made it a good ten feet or so before another daemon came out of nowhere. This daemon was smaller, squatter, and Prompto had paid enough attention to Miss Anna’s stories to recognize a goblin when he saw one. It didn’t look nearly as goofy as it had in the picture books.

This daemon also sniffed the air, though it didn’t lunge for Prompto’s ankles like he expected. He ran from that one too.

That was how he spent the night. There were no shadows to jump into, no trees to climb even if Prompto had been brave enough to climb them. The daemons were everywhere—giant and small, glowing and dingy, with rumbling breaths and gaping maws. All of them held sharp teeth and sharper gazes, and they were all looking for him. There was nowhere to hide.

He made it through that night, somehow. After that, he was extra careful about traveling before dark.

 

 

If Prompto were honest with himself, he didn’t actually know where he was going.

No place he found was like Gralea. There weren’t as many people outside Gralea as there had been within it, and there were no more cities. There was just snow and ice and little tin shacks scattered between the hills.

He thought about turning around, about going back and seeing of the school was open again, but doing that meant thinking about how to get back to Gralea in the first place and Prompto wasn’t sure how to do that. He didn’t want to think about that, though. If he didn’t turn around, he wasn’t lost. So he kept walking.

It took a long time and a lot of days before Prompto found anything familiar.

He hadn’t noticed when it stopped snowing so much, but he did notice when there were buildings and people again. He noticed when there was a loud screeching like metal against metal throughout the town.

Prompto winced at the sound. The cluster of buildings Prompto had found wasn’t nearly as big as Gralea—nothing was—but it was a much bigger place than anywhere Prompto had found in a long time. There were so many more people than he had seen in a long time too.

“Come on, honey,” an adult said, pulling a child along. “We have to get on the train.”

A train. Prompto had never seen one of those before. Trains went places. People rode in them like cars. Prompto wanted to ride in one too.

He followed them.

 

 

Trains, he found, were loud and bumpy. But they moved fast too. Much faster than Prompto could move on his own.

He sat on the train until day turned to night and back, over and over. He looked in the different compartments and examined the people inside. In the back, at the far end of the train, there were a lot of boxes with different things inside, but Prompto couldn’t open any of them. There wasn’t much to do when he couldn’t get off.

Finally, a “conductor” came over the speakers and announced, “Last stop! Last stop for Tenebrae coming up!”

“Tenebrae” sounded familiar. He remembered it from the map. There had been a big gap between Gralea and Tenebrae. He had come a long way, and secretly Prompto was both scared and proud of himself for coming so far.

When the last few people on the train shuffled off, he followed.

 

 

Tenebrae was beautiful.

Just looking around made Prompto’s chest feel warm. There were fields upon fields of flowers everywhere he looked, all blue and brilliant and soft as nothing he’d ever felt before. The air felt warmer than Gralea too. Warm and welcoming, and Prompto didn’t know how a place like this could ever exist, but he was so happy to know that it did.

 

 

Prompto didn’t remember finding the palace. He hadn’t known it was a palace at the time; it had just looked like a really huge, white building. It rivaled the size of the labs, though it still didn’t reach as far into the skies as the labs had. Prompto liked that though. The palace looked nice and clean, and it smelled like the flowers that were scattered everywhere.

He didn’t remember finding the palace.

But he remembered when someone spoke.

To _him._

 

 

“Who are you?”

Prompto heard the words, but he didn’t register them. He looked at the tall stained-glass windows that rose far above his head. The sunlight streamed through the grass, casting reds and greens and blues across the marble floor. There was an image in the window of a woman in white and another woman made of ice, but Prompto didn’t recognize it. He looked at the way the light refracted through the glass instead.

“Excuse me?” The same voice said. “Can you hear me?”

He looked up; he hadn’t noticed when someone else had entered the room.

Except there wasn’t anybody new. There was Prompto—if he even counted as a person—and there was the girl who had been sitting in a cushy chair with a book in her lap when he’d walked in. Nobody else. So Prompto didn’t know who she was talking to, unless—

She was looking right at him.

Prompto froze.

The girl—she was taller than Prompto by a lot, though not adult sized—did not stand, but she set her book aside with a deliberate motion that he thought was meant not to startle him.

“My name is Lunafreya Nox Flueret,” she said in a tone that made Prompto think she’d had a lot of practice introducing herself. “May I have your name in return?”

It was impossible for her to be looking at _him_. He was nobody. He might has well have been a shadow to be stepped over.

When Prompto craned his neck to look around, however, checking to see if there was somebody standing behind a pillar he couldn’t see, the girl—Lunafreya—giggled.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice sounded the way moonlight looked. “I’m talking to you. To the blond boy in the white shirt. What’s your name?”

Prompto glanced down. His shirt was white. It was the last shirt he’d taken from the labs before he left. It had grown small enough that a sliver of his stomach was exposed when he lifted his arms. He had ditched the jacket he’d taken from Gralea when the air had grown warm again, though he’d kept the boots if for no other reason than having nothing else to wear.

He was shaking, he realized. Not the way he had shook at the cold or in fear back at the labs but shaking nonetheless. His skin prickled. His heart beat like the rumbling engine of the train.

Lunafreya was still looking at him, patient. When he tilted his head, her eyes followed. He didn’t think he could mistake her staring for anything else.

She could see him.

She could _see_ him.

As one final test, Prompto pointed a trembling finger at himself. Just to make sure. He didn’t think he could take it if she somehow wasn’t speaking to him.

Lunafreya nodded.

“Yes,” she said again, smiling. “You.”

Him. Prompto.

He dropped his arm to his side, eyes wide.

She’d asked him his name.

Nobody had ever introduced themselves to him before. Nobody had ever asked him his name before.

Nobody had ever _spoken_ to him before.

Prompto’s face felt hot. His chin wobbled.

Inexplicably, fat tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks before he realized what was happening. It had been a long, long time since Prompto had cried. He had thought he was all out of tears.

Lunafreya jumped to her feet. “Oh!”

She pulled a piece of cloth out of nowhere. Prompto’s vision was blurry enough that he hadn’t realized she had gotten up until she was kneeling in front of him, brushing his tears away with the handkerchief.

It felt so _soft_ on his skin. He hadn’t realized anything could feel that gentle. Watching parents with their children back in Gralea, Prompto had envied the way the Real People held each other with such reverence that he’d been forced to turn away when he saw it, too overcome with pain to watch.

Now, here, somebody was touching _him_. For the first time ever.

“There, there,” Lunafreya said kindly. “You’re not in trouble, I promise. No need for tears.”

Prompto thought there was a mighty need for tears indeed. His voice trembled before it even left his lips.

“I’m—” he hiccuped, voice hitching. “Prom—Prompto!”

He nearly shouted it. He wanted to hear his name from her mouth. He wanted somebody to acknowledge him, to hear him, to say _yes, your name is Prompto, what a very nice name it is_. To confirm what he’d always hoped.

“Prompto,” she repeated, and he felt something _burst_ in his chest at hearing his name from someone else’s tongue for the first time. “It’s very nice to meet you, Prompto. You may call me Luna.”

 

 

Nobody else came in the room. Not when Luna gently led him to the couch and not when she allowed him to cry into her nice clean handkerchief, probably ruining it forever. She ran her fingers through his hair, quietly letting him cry, and it was the best moment Prompto had ever had.

He suddenly realized he didn’t remember walking to the palace or entering the room. Like something else had led him here instead. It felt almost like a dream. He desperately hoped otherwise.

 

 

“Tell me, Prompto,” Luna said, like she could see every time he jumped in surprise at the use of his name. “How did you get here?”

Prompto swallowed. He looked at his boots and shrugged. 

“Come now,” she said, not unkindly. “You couldn’t have walked in here.”

Prompto nodded.

He wasn’t looking, but he swore her eyebrows raised anyway. “Really? Where did you walk from?”

He cleared his throat. “G—Gralea.”

“Gralea?” Luna repeated. At first he thought he had done something wrong, but then she continued, “That’s rather far. You walked all this way?”

Prompto shrugged again. It was more or less true, minus the train. He wasn’t sure how to say that though. It was like there was a block in his throat. He had ached for someone to talk to for so long, but now that he was here, having all this attention made his chest feel tight and weird. It was hard to speak.

Luna didn’t seem to think he was terrible though, which he was grateful for. She patted his hand and smiled at him. “That’s all right. How did you get into my reading room then? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

The answer to that was the same as the last, but for some reason Prompto didn’t want to settle for shrugging again. What he wanted to say wasn’t the exact truth, not for how he got _here_ , with Luna specifically, but he wanted to share it anyway.

When he slid out of his seat, Luna let him go. He felt her eyes trailing him carefully as he slipped over to a patch of sunlight on the wall. He couldn’t keep himself from checking to make sure she really was watching him, but every time he looked, Luna was there. He managed to return a wobbly smile.

Prompto breathed in. He breathed out.

He jumped into the shadows.

No. He _became_ a shadow, inky and two-dimensional and the opposite of Real. Then he stepped out, back into the light.

Luna’s eyes were wide.

Prompto ducked his head, embarrassed, suddenly hyperaware of all the differences between them; first and foremost being that she was Real and kind and tall and that he was—not.

“Oh,” Luna breathed.

His tongue felt thick and clumsy when he spoke. It had been a long time since the songs of Miss Anna’s classroom. “Um. Do—do you know what I am?”

Luna looked at him sadly. He felt himself sinking before she even answered.

“No,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Prompto nodded and looked at the ground. Part of him had hoped, but he wasn’t surprised.

And then, because the day had been full of surprises and Luna’s kindness was at the top of that list, she left her seat to crouch in front of him and lay her hand on his shoulder. He wanted to melt into that touch and savor it forever. “But I think I know where you need to be.”

Prompto sniffed, barely swallowing the second wave of tears that threatened to overtake him. His face still felt awash with heat from the first wave. His eyes stung, and his throat felt swollen and thick. “Where?”

He hoped it was a place for people like him. For fake people, for ghosts, for people who could touch one another and be gentle and wipe tears away and—

Luna squeezed his shoulder. “Somewhere far from here.”

 

 

The puppy Pryna was tiny. Very tiny. So tiny Prompto thought her name should be “Tiny” instead of Pryna, but Pryna had squeaked a bark at him when he had embarrassingly suggested so to Luna. Luna had laughed, though, and Pryna had licked his cheeks when Luna handed her over, so he thought he was forgiven.

To be forgiven so quickly by the first people he’d ever met. Wow.

Pryna was only a puppy, but Luna had promised him that she knew where to go and Prompto trusted her. So when he set Pryna on the ground and she bounded off, Prompto followed.

Time seemed to move differently with Pryna. Prompto remembered walking monotonously for days and days between towns, watching the snow turn to green and the stars shift at night. With Pryna, Prompto wasn’t sure if time moved faster or slower or if he was just forgetting things, but it felt like no time at all before the Sylleblossoms that Luna had told him about where far behind him and he saw himself looking at a bedroom entirely unfamiliar to him.

Prompto looked around, but he was quickly distracted by Pryna’s high-pitched bark. Her nails clicked on the hardwood floor as she trotted over to a desk and into the arms of a dark haired boy who bent over to greet her.

Prompto stiffened.

So this was Noctis.

Luna had told him the he needed to find Noctis, to befriend and support him if he could. Prompto had no idea what a person like him had to offer someone like Noctis or Luna—who were Real People, people with magic in their blood. Amazing people, if Noctis was anything like Luna.

But Luna had asked and so Prompto would try.

“Will he see me?” Prompto had asked, anxious. Was Luna the only one in the whole world who could see him? Despite Luna’s urging, Prompto didn’t think he could stand leaving her so soon.

Luna nodded. “He will. It’s the magic in our blood.”

Prompto hadn’t known who “our” was—Luna and Noctis? Luna and others?—but he nodded anyway. The unknown felt so big. Bigger than Prompto by far. Maybe bigger than the whole world.

“Are…” He had been afraid to ask. “Are _we_ friends?”

Luna had softened then.

“We are,” she’d assured him. “But I think it’d be good for you to be friends with Noctis too. For both of you.”

There had been other words exchanged, but then Prompto was following Pryna and then he was here. Wherever “here” was.

And there was Noctis.

Noctis looked up. The small grin he’d offered Pryna dropped in favor of a frown when he saw Prompto standing there. Pryna squirmed in his lap.

“Who are _you_?”

Prompto swallowed, pulse leaping as he was acknowledged for the second time in a day. Really, for the second time in his life. The exhilaration of that hadn’t worn off yet and though he thought it never would, he didn’t want it to show.

He was nervous. Noctis looked a lot more apprehensive than Luna had been. But he was also a lot closer to Prompto in size too, and for some reason that reassured Prompto. Noctis was more like him than Luna had been already. Even though he’d liked Luna  a lot too.

Luna had said Prompto was meant to be here, and Prompto wanted to trust her. So he hoped Noctis would grow to trust him too.

“I’m Prompto,” he said.

Maybe he’d dreamed up his name after all. But it was his now, all the same.

**Author's Note:**

> The switch from things from "Outside" (capitalized) to "outside" (lowercase) and other such words is on purpose and meant to signify Prompto growing and learning the reality of things. 
> 
> I want to write more of this AU in the future, but I don't have much in terms of long, cohesive plot. We'll see if I ever do. There are recurring scenes I think about a lot. This was a good warm-up for getting back into FFXV for me. 
> 
> Feel free to leave a comment below or hmu at my [tumblr!](http://someobscurereference.tumblr.com/)


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